Does Low Cost Mean High Risk?

There have been several recent incidents with Adam Air, based in Indonesia, including a flight that disappeared.Credit
Damas Ardian/Bloomberg News

IN the wake of September’s crash in Phuket of a jet from One-Two-Go Airlines, a Thai low-cost carrier, some aviation experts expressed shock that the plane had even tried to land. Shortly before the jet came down, other aircraft landing on the Thai island had warned traffic controllers of dangerously wet and windy conditions, and the One-Two-Go pilots could have canceled their landing. They didn’t, and more than 80 passengers were killed when the jet skidded beyond the runway and burst into flames.

If they had followed One-Two-Go’s history, though, observers might not have been shocked by the crash. South Korean and Thai regulators previously had cited One-Two-Go’s parent company for poor safety measures. Worse, the crash revealed one of the biggest worries about travel in Asia today: In a developing region witnessing a boom in the number of low-cost airlines, can tourists trust their lives on these budget carriers?

Once dominated by large airlines like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, Asia has seen an explosion of low-cost carriers in the past five years. A pioneer, Air Asia, based in Malaysia, demonstrated that the region’s growing middle classes, who couldn’t afford full fare, would pay for cheaper seats.

Following Air Asia’s success, many others have followed, a boom of names like the India-based Air Deccan and Spice Jet and Philippines-based Cebu Pacific. Some low-cost airlines, like Singapore-based Tiger Airways, are even branching out into Australia and other regions. Governments have been happy to oblige, with Thailand allowing an expansion of carriers like One-Two-Go, Bangkok Airways and Nok Air.

The emergence of discount Asian carriers has enormous benefits for travelers. On the popular Bangkok-Singapore corridor, Air Asia is selling some round-trip tickets for about $150, compared with $500 or more on Singapore Airlines. The low-cost airlines have also boosted traffic to destinations like Luang Prabang, the old royal capital of Laos.

According to figures compiled by the international flight information company OAG, the number of low-cost flights in the Asia-Pacific region has grown from 3,900 six years ago to over 60,000 today. “The rapid pace of low-cost carrier expansion is set to continue,” says a report issued by Derek Sadubin, chief operating officer at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, another industry analyst. “The projected low-cost carrier fleet growth figures are staggering.”

But explosive growth can also make companies reckless. “Regulators are again concerned that the market has been growing too quickly,” wrote Nicholas Ionides of Flight International, a leading aviation industry publisher. Though many budget carriers have young fleets, some Asian carriers buy old planes that had been sitting, unused, in American deserts; on a Nok Air flight this year from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, what looked like duct tape was holding together seats and parts of the bathroom.

The expansion of low-cost carriers and the boom in travel in India and China create other worrying trends. They have sparked a severe pilot shortage in Asia, which may hurt safety as more inexperienced men and women settle into the cockpit. Meanwhile, some aviation analysts worry that Asian governments, caught in a low-cost frenzy, are allowing businesspeople to start airlines without enough capital on hand. Many Asian nations cannot compare with Western Europe and North America, where carriers like Ryanair and Southwest emerged in markets that already had strong safety standards.

“When the U.S.A. deregulated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was feared that it would increase the accident rate,” said David Learmount, a safety expert at Flight International magazine. “But it didn’t. Part of the reason it didn’t was that the Federal Aviation Administration heightened its safety oversight vigilance just in case.”

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Southwest, for instance, has a strong safety record, yet in Thailand not only One-Two-Go but also the low-cost carrier Phuket Air have come under scrutiny. Phuket Air overshot a runway landing in eastern Thailand. Before taking off to Britain in 2005, passengers reportedly saw fuel leaking out of a Phuket Air plane and refused to fly on it. In 2006 Phuket Air was banned from flying into the European Union. (It was reinstated earlier this year.)

“Deregulation in Indonesia made already bad safety records even worse because the aviation authorities had no teeth, so there was no safety oversight to protect travelers,” Mr. Learmount said.

Indeed, Indonesia may be the scariest nation in Asia for fliers. In the past three years alone, a plane from Adam Air, an Indonesian low-cost carrier, vanished without a trace; another Adam Air plane cracked open upon landing; a Garuda Indonesia flight overran the runway in Yogyakarta and caught fire, killing at least 20; and an aircraft of Lion Air, another discount airline, went off a runway on Java, killing about 30.

Smart travelers are learning how to find solid information about Asia’s new airlines. The Aviation Safety Network (www.aviation-safety.net) contains statistics on air accidents broken down by carrier and region, as well as weekly updates of air safety incidents. Other Web sites like www.airsafe.com have similar data on incidents; www.airlinequality.com offers passengers’ takes on many budget carriers.

Government regulators outside Asia can also help. The International Aviation Safety Assessments program of the F.A.A. (www.faa.gov/safety/programs_initiatives/oversight/iasa) contains ratings of each nation’s air safety, while the European Union maintains a blacklist of airlines (www.ec.europa.eu/transport/air-ban/pdf/list_en.pdf) that are banned from flying into Europe. Currently, the European Union bans every Indonesian carrier.

Eventually, the opinions of foreign visitors may force Asian airlines to improve. “Watch Korea and Taiwan; their safety oversight was rubbish not long ago, but now it’s good,” Mr. Learmount said. “Korean Air lost its right to code-share with U.S. carriers — notably Delta — until it set up a credible safety management system.”

“The driving force” for safer planes is “competition itself,” he says. “People in the U.S. don’t fly with airlines that keep crashing.”